There are a number of particulars to take pleasure in within the story of Bryan Johnson, the middle-aged almost-billionaire spending $2m (£1.6m) a 12 months pursuing everlasting youth. As described within the Instances this week, Johnson has acquired “plasma infusions” from his 17-year-old son, had “33,537 pictures of his bowels” taken, and tried experimental remedies beforehand solely examined on mice. However the one I like finest, I feel, revolves round his meal plan. As a person who made $800m (£646m) from the sale of his firm to eBay, he enjoys a eating regimen of “brown sludge” manufactured from pureed greens – child meals, in different phrases. From the pictures, these measures actually appear to be working: the 45-year-old tech entrepreneur seems roughly 43.
It’s, in fact, a supply of dependable leisure to review how the very rich set about ruining their lives. If extra is the quickest and most typical path to self-destruction, self-denial is the extra rewarding strategy for the idle observer. There’s nothing fairly just like the spectacle of a person with big assets failing to grapple along with his personal mortality and spending what valuable time he has left in joyless pursuit of a aim that’s doomed to fail.
This schadenfreude is unattractive, little question, and to Johnson’s credit score, throughout the video feed of the plasma transfusion, he good-naturedly learn out a number of the horrible messages coming in from the general public, together with: “I hope he will get hit by a bus,” and “Possibly he chokes on a bit of broccoli or mushroom” – which, Johnson allowed, would definitely reside as much as the “irony in life”. Maybe in his place, we’d additionally throw cash on the single insurmountable drawback of life – particularly dying – and expose ourselves to the identical ridicule. However the whole enterprise, widespread in varied varieties throughout the billionaire class, appears premised on such a defective understanding of what it’s to be alive that it’s arduous to not surprise how these folks grew to become so wealthy within the first place.
That is the perennial chicken-and-egg query in regards to the hyper-wealthy: is their denial of actuality one of many options that enabled their wealth, or a delusion that comes about in its wake? Normal motivational recommendation to simply accept no limitations is perhaps helpful when you’re organising a cost processing software program firm, however appears much less so when grappling with the which means of life. It’s the hubris of people that take into account themselves above the principles, together with these governing the physique (one is reminded of Steve Jobs making an attempt unsuccessfully to hack typical most cancers care). Sooner or later there’ll, presumably, be breakthroughs and disruptions within the area of human longevity, however it appears unlikely they’ll contain a eating regimen of pureed greens.
The larger query is considered one of value; within the case of Johnson and his cohorts, not monetary however existential. How unhappy, one would possibly assume, to be so untethered from, and horrified by, who one is within the current as to throw all one’s assets at reversal. It’s one factor to work out and eat properly in an effort to stave off decrepitude, however fairly one other to obsess about making an attempt to get again to being a youngster. One assumes that, when all these processes fail, Johnson and the others have a cryogenic security internet and belief of their heirs to carry them again when the know-how exists – which raises the one and solely upside to a possible mass extinction by international warming.
The billionaires can be higher off investing, maybe, in additional low-tech assets, similar to a pleasant introduction to existential philosophy, on the belief that brown meals and life-extending procedures examined on mice will solely get them to this point. If a part of the make-up of people that grow to be so profitable is a excessive tolerance for threat and regard for hazard, they may blow their very own minds by dealing with absolutely the certainty that their brief, bracing presence on Earth is all there may be or will ever be – and that to disclaim it might imply lacking the whole factor.
